


Monster Hospital

by Hexiva



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Division Three, Farouk POV, Gen, POV First Person, Post-Season/Series 02, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 11:59:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hexiva/pseuds/Hexiva
Summary: Post season 2, Division Three requires Amahl Farouk to attend a psychiatric evaluation as a condition of his working with them. He agrees.





	Monster Hospital

The first thing I noticed as I entered the doctor’s office was that he was not afraid of me.

People aren’t always, not even when they know what I truly am. But it’s rare enough to be a curiosity, this bravery or foolishness that leads humans to approach me as if I were merely one of them. In a way, I enjoy it - variety is the spice of life, after all, and they amuse me.  

He was somewhat younger than my physical body, in his thirties or forties, with tanned skin and black hair slicked back, with the sides of his head shaved. His clothing was casual, modern - a blue button-up shirt with grey slacks. 

He was thinking that I was an unusual patient - a massively powerful mutant turned parasite turned Division Three agent - but that he had seen men like me before. Mass murderers, serial killers, mutant terrorists and human hatemongers - he’d seen them all in his years working for Division Three. 

I shook my head and smiled. “You have never met anyone like me before, Doctor.” He found my smile faintly unsettling: too urbane, too clean-cut for the deeds attributed to my name. I offered him my hand. “Amahl Farouk. Ahh, but I imagine you already know that.” I gestured to the clipboard he held in his hand.

The doctor didn’t allow himself to hesitate before reaching out and shaking my hand. “I’m Dr. Ahmed Hakim. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Amahl.”

My name flowed more naturally in his accent than that of the other American agents, and I tried to guess his country of origin from it. India, I thought, and then checked his mind to confirm it. Ahh - Pakistan. It occured to me that I was older than the country where he was born.

“The pleasure is mine, I assure you,” I said, giving him a knife-edge smile calculated to make him wonder exactly what I meant by that. I took my seat on the couch across from him. “I admit, I was quite amused to learn that a psychiatric evaluation was a prerequisite for working for Division Three. I had assumed it was more of a case of - ahh, what do they say?” I tilted my head, and then snapped my fingers. “Ah yes. ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.’”

Dr. Hakim gave a little chuckle. “I wouldn’t put it like that. We are a federal agency, after all.”

“Mmmm. Another one of the American government’s shadowy projects to ‘keep the world safe.’” I shook my head, pityingly. 

“We’re here to talk about you,” Dr. Hakim admonished me. “Not about Division Three.”

I smiled. “Of course, of course. I do love to talk about myself. Where shall we begin?”

“Maybe we could start with the activities that brought you back into Division Three’s purview,” the doctor said, clicking his pen. 

I laughed. “Which ones?”

“Let’s start with the initial encounter,” Hakim said. He was thinking overtime, trying to figure out how far he dared push me. He wasn’t afraid I would harm him - although he should have been - but simply that I would shut down.

As if I was some traumatized woman afraid to talk about her own life! I shook my head, despairingly.  

“You possessed a young mutant,” the doctor said. “David . . . Haller?” He flipped through his notes. “For thirty years. What was that like?”

A blunt question, and he and I both knew it. I didn’t let myself react, instead lounging back on the couch thoughtfully. “I was a prisoner. A disembodied mind, haunting the son of my worst enemy like a ghost.”

“How much control did you have?” the doctor asked. “Were you just a passenger - or could you influence him?”

“I could influence him,” I allowed, thinking about it. “Through dreams and hallucinations and altered memories. I was the voice in his head, the devil on his shoulder. But I could not control him - most of the time. Only when he was at his most broken could I seize control directly.”

Hakim scribbled something on his clipboard. “What was your relationship with your host like? Did you resent him?”

“Of course I resented him,” I said, and was surprised by the sharpness in my own voice. “I was a prisoner and he was my gaoler. His father executed me and sentenced me to this fate - as if he had any right to judge  _ me.” _

“Is Haller responsible for his father’s actions?” Hakim asked. His tone was as neutral as possible, but I could see through him, could detect the judgement in it.

“Someone has to pay,” I said, sharply. “Why not him?”

The doctor nodded. “What Xavier did to you left you feeling furious,” he said. 

That phrasing prickled on my nerves, but I pushed through and calmed myself. “Of course. He killed me, after all. How would you feel?”

“I can’t say I know - but I doubt I’d be very happy about it,” Hakim said, mildly. “Are you still interested in getting revenge on Xavier and Haller?”

I considered this. “In a way,” I said, slowly. “I think he has suffered enough - don’t you? Now I have other goals.”

Interest sparked through Hakim’s mind. “And what are those?”

I leaned in. “To corrupt him,” I said, my voice soft. “To take hold of his mind and warp it to my own ends. Until he understands what  _ I  _ am. What I have become. I’m going to make him like  _ me.”  _

Hakim blinked back at me. “Why?” he asked, and I could tell he was genuinely confused.

“He thinks me  _ haula, _ a monster,” I said, with chagrin. “Just like you do.” He opened his mouth, and I cut him off. “No, don’t lie to me. I can read your mind, Doctor. Look at me. I am a  _ god.  _ Not a monster, or a criminal, or a parasite. I am something greater than that. Something that cannot be categorized or disregarded or defeated.”

He listened to my speech, and took a moment to consider it. So far as I could tell, he wasn’t bothered by what I’d said. “You feel like his opinion of you impinges on your self-image,” he said. “How do you feel about others’ opinions of you? Not Haller or Xavier, but other people?”

I shrugged. “They don’t matter. They are insects. Shadows.”

“Including me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He didn’t comment. “Why is Haller different?”

His cool manner began to irk me, but I considered the question. “A difficult thing to put into words,” I said. “He and I were intertwined for thirty years. Can you imagine, Doctor, what that does to a man?”

“He’s the only one who matters to you,” Hakim noted, “but you resent him. Is that lonely?”

I blinked at him. “Lonely?” It was the first time he had really surprised me in our session. Perhaps I should have been reading his mind more closely. “Why should I be lonely?”

“You think that no one else is worthy of your attention,” Hakim said, calmly. “You dismiss them. Does that feel like being alone?”

I frowned, faintly annoyed. “No. I have company.” I pushed away annoyance, and gave him a sharp, false smile. “Whether they want to fill that role, or not.”

He didn’t seem bothered by that, and I discovered I didn’t like that. I had expected, on some level, that any psychiatrist I talked to would be shocked, horrified by my perversity. Instead, the doctor reacted to me the same way they had all reacted to David - as if I was just another patient, someone to be evaluated and discarded. 

I should not have been surprised by their blindness, I suppose. Humans have always been blind to great men.

“What does that look like?” Hakim asked, scribbling on his clipboard. “Your ‘company.’”

“I have always been able to compel followers, if I desired them,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “And in those times when I was alone, I have other methods. Where do you think I learned that a mind can be preserved beyond the death of the body?”

Hakim considered that. “You - absorb people into your mind?” He looked through his notes. “There is mention of that in our files - Lenore Busker. You’re telling me she wasn’t the first?”

I chuckled, and shook my head. “No. There were many more besides. Like a cast of characters in a play, that I can put onstage or set aside as I please.”   
  
Hakim looked up at me. “Are you the audience,” he asked, “or the performer?”

“What does that mean?” I said, frowning.

“Do you keep these people around because you want to observe them?” he asked. “Or because you want them to observe you?”

I scowled. “A meaningless linguistic distinction,” I snapped. “But that is the problem with you psychoanalysts, isn’t it? You like to invent problems when there are none.”

Hakim tilted his head. “Where did you get that idea from?” And then, looking at his clipboard, he said, “I see hear that David Haller was in a mental hospital and under constant psychiatric assessment while you were in his head.”

I stopped, and looked back at him, silently. 

Despite what David no doubt thinks, I didn’t enjoy my time in the mental hospital - and it was  _ my  _ time, as much as David’s. David lets himself imagine that his experiences are solely his own, as if it was only him who suffered in those years.  _ I  _ was there. Forgotten, invisible, deleting myself from every memory - but I was  _ there. _

“He reported that the psychiatric medication helped with his ‘mental illness,’” Hakim said. He leaned back in his chair. “But  _ you  _ were the mental illness. Weren’t you?”

I shook my head. “It was not me alone. Or at least, not by the end. How much of the  _ Wahnsinn, _ the illness - how much was my influence and how much was inborn?”

“Did the meds help you?” Hakim asked. “Or hurt you?”

I thought about that. “Both,” I said, after a moment. “They dulled both of us. We were imprisoned together. That is why he turned to stronger drugs - to drown out my voice in his head. To isolate me. We were at war, he and I - I, trying to destroy him, and him, trying to destroy me.”

“You talk as if you were equals,” Hakim said, quietly. “In fact, he’s the only one you talk about like that. But he didn’t even know you existed. Was he trying to hurt you? Or was he only trying to survive?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question. His eyes were locked on mine. “Does it matter?” I asked, waving off the question. “The effect was the same.”

“You already know what I think,” Hakim said, and he was right. “What’s important is what you think. Amahl - do you feel any remorse for what you did to Haller?”

It wasn’t the first time I had considered this question, but I thought about it, nonetheless. “No,” I said. “Why should I? Regrets are for lesser beings.”

He wrote something down. He didn’t let it show on his face, but there was a sense of - fulfillment, in his thoughts.And at the same time, disappointment. As if I had turned out to be exactly what he expected me to be. Had checked all of the symptoms, so he could put me in a neat little box. 

I couldn’t countenance that. I stood up. “I think we’ve come as far as we can here today, Doctor. It was a pleasure meeting with you.”

Hakim glanced down at his notes. “I suppose I have enough for now. Thank you for meeting with me today.”

He meant it. He liked me, in almost the same way I liked my prisoners, the minds I kept trapped inside my head to entertain me. I was a professional curiosity to him. 

He extended a hand for me to shake, but I simply smiled, and didn’t lift my hand. His arm dropped, and he turned towards the door. “Well, you’ll be hearing from our superiors soon - about the results. Hope you have a good day - whatever the results are.”

“Ah, ah, ah,” I said, very softly. “You’re not going anywhere.”

His hand froze, an inch away from the doorknob. It took him a moment to realize that it was my influence stopping him there, and then, for the first time, fear sparked in his mind. “Amahl,” he said, his eyes fixed on the door. “I am not your enemy.”

“I know,” I said. “You are simply another insect.”

I snapped my fingers, and Dr. Hakim crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

When he woke up, I would have implanted him with new memories of our session together - ones which would make me seem an acceptable ally for Division Three. 

I bent over and picked up his clipboard from where it had fallen, and flipped through to his notes page.  _ Psychopath,  _ it said, in Hakim’s elegant handwriting. I made a face; but I was not surprised. There was another comment there -  _ Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome resulting from psychic disembodiment & effective long-term captivity.  _ That one I hadn’t expected.

A monster  _ and  _ a victim -  that was the good doctor’s diagnosis. Both at once. And nothing more than that.

Division Three had required me to come to this evaluation, that much was true. But that was not the whole truth, was it? I could have walked in and enthralled the doctor immediately, and spent the rest of the session making him dance for my entertainment. That was the great danger that Division Three had risked when they took the halo off of my head. 

I didn’t  _ have  _ to stay for the session itself. But I did. And in doing so, I knew, I had been asking a question, implicitly. And I had not gotten the answer I desired. 

I looked down at the clipboard in my hand, and wondered what answer, in the end, I had wanted. 


End file.
